In many of the comments, some of them sent my way, atheists slammed Catholics for mentioning the fact that the building is a Cathedral, a church, a place of Christian worship, the entire reason the building was built, the reason all of the art in it was made, the reason the music that came from it was created and performed, in every aspect, in every way, the existence of Notre Dame Cathedral was an expression of the Christian religion. There is no honest way to try to turn it into a museum, as some Communist government would a famous Church under their domination and pretend it means that.
None of the artistic or architectural significance of the building is honestly, artistically or even rationally dissociable from that religion without doing damage to its integrity, any appreciation of that art which is not informed by that religious content is a distortion of it. You can get something out of the form, you can get something out of the attractiveness of religious art but if you don't experience it in line with those whose religious devotion was their motivation in creating what they did, your experience is a distortion of it. To an extent that can even be true if you are religious, a Christian, even a Catholic and have a different theological orientation to the creator. There are works by composers, such as Guillaume de Machaut which are almost impossible to experience as he intended because, as the writer of the words and the music, you would have to believe as he believed to really get what he wanted you to. You would, for example, have to really despise the devil, to hate sin, to believe in Redemption History which would mean you would have to believe both Testaments and share Machaut's view of both divine and chivalric love (he was a very French, very worldly, late Medieval cleric) to get the emotional intensity of this Motet
To really get it the beliefs behind it are as important as understanding the words and singing the right notes in the right rhythms. To get some idea of that, you can read the notes for the video. It is, in a very real way, not possible for us to fully understand art to the extent that we don't share its intellectual, emotional and credal basis. I learned that when I read a translation of Basho's Journey To The Interior and found myself doing nothing but floundering. And I was reading the included, far longer and more extensive explanatory commentary as I read the translation.
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When I posted that passage, John 2:19, in which, confronted by the authorities Jesus scandalized them by saying if they demolished the temple, he would build it up in three days, a passage certainly known to almost everyone who was involved with building the Cathedral, something they would have heard read in that Cathedral many times over their lifetime. I was trying to understand what I was seeing and hearing. I am not an expert in liturgical history but I would be surprised if that passage were not part of the typical Lenten liturgy then, something which, if they witnessed the destruction of their Cathedral during Holy Week, they'd have thought of.
I was trying to imagine how the destruction of the Second Temple by the intentional looting and burning of it by the Romans was as devastating to the Jews in the Apostolic period as watching Notre Dame burn, maybe even worse because it was destroyed by the occupying army of Rome which would continue to occupy their country, its destruction part of their imperial domination, their program of destruction of their identity. It would have been like the Nazis buring it down, no doubt something that was all too imaginable during the war, as the pricks on the internet tried to whip up with lies, trying, Nazi-like, to pin the fire on Muslims, yesterday.
In John's Gospel, just the idea of the Temple being destoyed was horrible to imagine for those in Jerusalem. And, remember, it was the Second Temple, the one built after Solomon's temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, rebuilt five hundred years earlier. The people who built Notre Dame certainly knew what Jesus said, they would have either heard it read or would have heard it sung (I believe but don't know that the Gregorian antiphon was sung then) they would have fully believed that Jesus did what he said, only he didn't mean the building, he meant his Resurrection.
If you don't believe in the Resurrection of Jesus, I'm sorry, it couldn't mean the same thing to you that it does someone who does believe that. If you don't believe in The Blessed Virgin, even if you share my believer's skepticism of the Birth narrative, it couldn't mean the same thing to you as someone who does. It is called NOTRE DAME, for the love of Mike! People who believe it hear the music, they see the art, they see the architecture - the people who built would have believed those things as they built what even the most atheistic of asthetes sees. But it had to have meant more to them than it could to those who don't believe it.
As a Christian, as one who is still considered a Catholic and who, culturally has no choice but to be one, I don't apologize for taking the words of Jesus and James and Paul, the example of Mary. Notre Dame (who I am apostate enough to consider the first Christian priest) to be more important than the building and art that are admittedly important things about the whole thing. I don't apologize for thinking the lives of the firefighters is more important than any object rescued or destroyed. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't get any of the art that flows from the Gospels, the Letters, The Law and the Prophets. Any person who doesn't believe that doesn't get any of it, at all. If I didn't believe the lives of People was more important, the art would mean nothing to me.
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